The present invention relates to disaster recovery as a shared resource service. More specifically, the invention relates to employing at least two separate but parallel processes for supporting disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual services by a thirty party to provide failover in the event of some form of a catastrophe. Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are document in a service level agreement (SLA), and the third party vendor provides failover to a cloud computing environment. Aspects of the SLA generally identify disaster recovery time and recovery point objectives. More specifically, the recovery time objective is the maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network, or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs. The recovery time objective is a function of the extent to which the interruption disrupts normal operations and the amount of revenue lost per unit time as a result of the disaster. The recovery time objective is an important consideration in disaster recovery planning. The recovery point object is the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure. Once the recovery point objective for a given computer, system, or network has been defined, it determines the minimum frequency with which backups must be made. Accordingly, the recovery time and recovery point objective assist with selection of optimal disaster recovery technologies and procedures.
When a disaster recovery is issued or declared, the DRaaS provider launches an exact copy of the client information technology environment per the terms identified in the SLA. More specifically, the recovery is a replication of the identified virtual machine and virtual disk configurations.